John MacArthur, Expository Preacher Who Reached Millions through Grace to You, Dies at 86
John MacArthur, the influential American pastor who popularized expository preaching in the modern era and whose Grace to You ministry spread the gospel around the world, died July 14th following a battle with pneumonia. He was 86. MacArthur took the role as pastor of Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, Calif., in 1969, with little fanfare, but within a few years became known to Christians across American thanks to a growing tape ministry and then, in 1977, to listeners in Baltimore, Md., when a local radio station aired one of his sermons -- the first station outside his region to do so. Christian radio was growing, and MacArthur's clear, verse-by-verse teaching found an eager audience hungry for doctrinal depth and biblical clarity.
In the early 1980s, Grace to You became a self-sustaining nonprofit organization and later acquired its own building. The Grace to You radio broadcast airs over 1,000 times each day across the English-speaking world, reaching major cities on every continent. Its Spanish-language version also broadcasts nearly 1,000 times daily, covering 23 countries across Europe and Latin America. Meanwhile, MacArthur’s church continued to thrive, and in his final years, it held two morning services in a 3,500-seat auditorium -- often filled to capacity each Sunday.
His books and commentaries rivaled his sermons in popularity. The MacArthur Study Bible remains one of the most-used study Bibles in the world. His books included The Gospel According to Jesus (1988), The Gospel According to the Apostles (1993), Twelve Ordinary Men (2002), Twelve Extraordinary Women (2005), Slave: The Hidden Truth About Your Identity in Christ (2010), Strange Fire (2013), Ashamed of the Gospel (1993, updated 2010) and Anxious for Nothing (2006). He wrote nearly 400 books and study guides, according to his official bio.
He also founded a school, The Master’s Seminary, in 1986. Each of his 3,000 sermons spanning 40 years are available for free at GTY.org -- one of the largest such collections. He preached through the entire New Testament for his congregation, covering some of the chapters and verses multiple times. Grace to You’s tagline became, “Unleashing God's Truth, One Verse at a Time.” MacArthur said his expository sermons grew from a personal desire to understand the Bible in depth.
“My initial goal was not to make up sermons that people would like; my goal was to comprehend the New Testament,” he said in a personal testimony posted on the ministry’s website. “I was in awe, and still am, of the Bible, and particularly in awe of the New Testament -- not that it’s better, but that it’s the full revelation, It’s the completed revelation - not better than the Old Testament. But I’ve always been in awe of the glories of the New Testament, and I knew that if I didn’t do expositional teaching, I would never ever dig out all that was there. And so, basically, it was my own personal desire to understand everything in the New Testament. I was very frustrated when I used to read the Bible in my devotions, because I didn’t know what I was reading. I couldn’t understand it all; I didn’t know the depth and breadth of it. So, I admit that I started out to go through the whole New Testament for a very self-centered reason, and that is that I wanted to know what it meant.”
As he grew older, his knowledge deepened -- and his pace slowed. It took him eight years to preach through Matthew.
“My insights into the text got greater and greater, and so, it was harder for me to get through a book,” he said.
His distinctive theological blend -- a Reformed Baptist with a premillennial view of the End Times -- attracted followers from across a wide range of denominations. Some aligned with him on only one aspect of his teaching, but nearly all respected his deep reverence for Scripture. Asked what he wanted his legacy to be, MacArthur replied simply: “I just really want to be known as someone who was a servant of the Lord.”
“You know, Paul uses the word hupēretēs, a galley slave, under rower. Just that I was faithful to the Word of God, faithful to the teaching of the Word of God and to the unfolding of the mysteries of the gospel of the New Testament,” he said. “That’s -- it’s not about how many schools or how many books or how many radio programs. It’s just about being faithful to the Word of God.”
Photo Credit: ©Grace to You / SWN Design
Michael Foust has covered the intersection of faith and news for 20 years. His stories have appeared in Baptist Press, Christianity Today, The Christian Post, the Leaf-Chronicle, the Toronto Star and the Knoxville News-Sentinel.
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Originally published July 14, 2025.
